Constitutional Accountability Center was a participant or observer in the following events:

Brooke Obie of the Constitutional Accountability Center attacks a recent statement of position by Connecticut attorney general candidate Martha Dean, who advocates the concept of “nullification”—the idea that states can ignore or override federal laws if they so choose (see October 14, 2010). Obie says Dean’s position is a “dangerous” claim that ignores the fundamental precepts of the US Constitution and every relevant court decision since before the Civil War. Articles III and VI of the Constitution explicitly place federal law over states’ laws, and place the Supreme Court firmly in the position of being the final arbiter of whether a federal law is unconstitutional. “It is disturbing that Dean, seeking office as a state’s chief lawyer, said in the interview that she does not ‘accept’ that the Supreme Court has this authority,” Obie writes, and refers Dean to the first Chief Justice, John Marshall, who wrote that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Nullification is “completely unconstitutional,” Obie writes, and has been used to bring about “some of the most divisive moments in our history: from the attempted destruction of our great nation by secessionists in the 19th century, to the dividing of people by segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s. Encouraging such backsliding of America into its darkest days is an extremely dangerous position for anyone to take, let alone someone seeking to become a state attorney general.” [Constitutional Accountability Center, 10/14/2010] In the comments section of Obie’s article, Dean reprints a post from Thomas Woods that Woods posted on his blog in response to Obie. Woods is a pro-Confederate segregationist. Woods calls Obie’s work a “fifth-grade research paper masquerading as a critique of Martha Dean,” and goes on to say that “[a]lmost every single sentence in this post is wrong. Your view of the Supremacy Clause is wrong, your view of Article III is grotesquely wrong, your summary of the history of nullification is absurd, and your comment about secessionists makes no sense. South Carolina was complaining that the NORTH was nullifying too much. Talk about getting the history exactly backwards!” He compares Obie’s views to “progressives,” neoconservatives, and Adolf Hitler. Think Progress’s legal expert Ian Millhiser later notes that Woods is a co-founder of the neo-Confederate League of the South, and has called the Civil War a battle between “atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other,” contending that the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 was “[t]he real watershed from which we can trace many of the destructive trends that continue to ravage our civilization today.” Dean has cited Woods before, in one debate reading aloud from his book in support of nullification. Woods is a prolific contributor to the far-right Tenth Amendment Center, a pro-nullification group which pushes political candidates to sign a pledge promising to nullify federal laws such as Social Security and Medicare which do not comply with their “tenther” view of the Constitution. [Constitutional Accountability Center, 10/14/2010; Think Progress, 10/19/2010]

Former Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) says that the US Supreme Court’s recent summary reversal of a Montana Supreme Court decision to uphold Montana’s ban on corporate political spending (see June 25, 2012) proves that the US Supreme Court is actively working to dismantle representative democracy. Referring to the 2010 Citizens United case that formed the basis for the Court’s recent decision (see January 21, 2010), Feingold says: “This court had one fig leaf left after this one awful decision two years ago.” The justices could claim “they were politically naive or didn’t know what would happen when they overturned 100 years of law on corporate contributions.” But after the American Tradition Partnership decision that reversed the Montana high court, he says, “They have shown themselves wantonly willing to undo our democracy.” Feingold continues: “This is one of the great turning points, not only in campaign finance but also in our country’s history. I believe we’re in a constitutional crisis.” Feingold heads an anti-Citizens United group called Progressives United, which works to raise awareness about the effects of the decisions and to persuade Congress to overturn the decision via legislation. He says the Supreme Court has “clearly become… a partisan arm of corporate America. This is a real serious problem for our democracy. It’s essentially a court that rules in one direction.… [T]his court is no longer perceived as the independent arbiter of the law that the people expect them to be.” A recent study by the Constitutional Accountability Center shows that during the tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s most powerful business lobbying organization (see January 21-22, 2010, June 26-28, 2010, July 26, 2010, August 2, 2010, October 2010, and February 10, 2011), which filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to rule against the Montana high court (see April 30, 2012), has seen victory in 68 percent of the cases in which it has filed briefs, a much higher success record than in earlier years. Feingold wrote an article for the Stanford Law Review claiming that the 2006-2008 rise in small donor contributions spurred corporations and the Supreme Court to create the Citizens United decision (see June 14, 2012). Feingold says: “The corporate interest in America saw the face of democracy, and so what they did was engineer this decision. They used it as an excuse to stop citizen democracy in this country.” Nevertheless, Feingold is confident that grassroots organizations such as Progressives United and efforts in other venues, including Congress and the Obama administration, will eventually see Citizens United overturned. For now, he quotes his campaign finance reform partner, Senator John McCain, who recently said, “I promise you there will be huge scandals” (see March 27, 2012). Feingold says, “There already is a scandal.” [Huffington Post, 6/27/2012]

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